#27 in History & criticism books
Use arrows to jump to the previous/next product
Reddit mentions of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Sentiment score: 1
Reddit mentions: 1
We found 1 Reddit mentions of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Here are the top ones.
Buying options
View on Amazon.comor
- Material: Clear Acrylic
- Overall Dimensions: 3"L x 2"W x 1-5/8"H
- Individually bagged and sealed.
- Holds phones either horizontally or vertically.
- Proudly made in the U.S.A.
Features:
Specs:
haha I understand that feeling.
On the psychology/cognitive science/neuroscience side:
Stanislas Dehaene argues that learning to read rewires the brain by co-opting other capacities and essentially constructing a new neural network dedicated to processing written language. It's an interesting theory and a great book, but a little dense.
Raymond Mar has done a bunch of interesting work on fiction and empathy. Here's a link to most of his papers.
There's some research on how fiction more broadly can increase altruism:
Barraza, J. A., Alexander, V., Beavin, L. E., Terris, E. T., & Zak, P. J. (2015). The heart of the story: Peripheral physiology during narrative exposure predicts charitable giving. Biological Psychology, 105, 138-143. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.01.008
A more philosophical take - Martha Nussbaum on 'reading for life'.
Here are some books that take a bit of a general overview:
Lisa Zunshine - Why We Read
My own area is actually situating a lot of this research in an evolutionary context - looking at how and why we tell stories and what role they have served over longer timeframes. Here are some others that have written on the topic. I disagree with them in quite a few places, and I'm essentially arguing that we need to expand on their accounts, but there's a lot to agree with as well, and they're worth a read:
Brian Boyd - On The Origin of Stories
Ellen Spolsky - The Contracts of Fiction
Jonathon Gottschall - The Storytelling Animal
Let me know if there's any papers/books that you can't get access to, I have them all in PDF format and would be happy to forward you anything you're interested in reading that isn't available to you.
As to why I chose the topic, essentially I have a bit of a generalist educational background: I majored in philosophy, psychology, history/politics and english literature/creative writing as an undergraduate, and did a Master's in cognitive science and philosophy. I'm what you would most definitely refer to as over-educated, and I don't mean that in a good way - I have an Australian equivalent to a student loan that isn't pretty (although still much lower than what it would have cost me in the US!). So, I wanted a way of getting paid to read and think about all the areas I'm interested in - and it turns out writing about the evolution of fiction takes me across a whole range of disciplines and a whole range of research areas, including evolutionary biology/psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, economics, literary theory, etc. That, and I guess I have always disagreed with the idea of art as simply escapism or entertainment and wanted to look at how important it has been, and continues to be, in shaping who we are and where we're going.